Tutorials and Samples

One of the best ways to learn about a technology is to read examples of code that make use of it. This page aims to identify resources where you can find such examples, including fully-working sub-systems that you can customise to your own needs. It is our intention that this section becomes one of the most rapidly-growing parts of our web site, and we invite you to contribute code samples of your own or suggest technologies that could be explored.

GitHub

Dyalog is moving towards using http://github.com/Dyalog as what will become the primary repository for the source code of all tools, templates and code samples.

Existing Tutorials and Samples

Click on one of the item headers below to take a closer look at tutorials and samples related to that topic:

Getting Started

The Getting Started page in the Learning portal recommends text books and on-line tutorials that can help you learn how to use the APL notation.

Functional Programming with dfns

The dfns workspace is a collection of functions that act as an exposition of functional programming in Dyalog. This workspace is included with all distributions of Dyalog and has its own home page at http://dfns.dyalog.com.

Object Oriented Programming

The application of the concepts of object oriented programming and details of object orientated functionality within Dyalog are explained in Object Oriented Programming for APL Programmers, which attempts to put the reader in a better position to decide when and how to combine array, functional and object thinking.

For APLers who want to see some code and get stuck in, a stripped-down version of this document is also available – Object Oriented Programming for Impatient APL Programmers. This covers the technical aspects of object orientated functionality within Dyalog without any of the explanatory material.

Using External Data

The loaddata workspace, which is distributed with the product on all platforms, contains example functions for reading and writing data in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, XML files, SQL tables and CSV/text files. You can read more about external data in the Tools section.

Sample web sites and services are available to show how to build web applications either by embedding Dyalog within the Microsoft IIS framework or using the free stand-alone tools: MiServer for web sites and SAWS for web services.